Well, what's going to happen is: The ISPs will eventually block most ports, "'cause most users don't need 'em." and that'll help some people. "Power users" will be able to pay an extra fee to get the ports unblocked - a "setup" or "administration" fee. Probably even a per-month fee, so they can/really/ get some extra cash.
Sort of. ISPs are being driven to this by larger inept player, such as AOL and M$N who will eventually win if nothing changes. AOL and M$N recently forced my ISP, Cox, to block port 25 except to their own smtp server. The threatened to bounce mail and Cox backed down. Predatory is too nice a word for that threat. Smaller ISPs will die if they reduce their service down to AOL standards.
Change, however, is the only constant. Someone is going to figure a way around the current broadband monopolies. Baring global NBC warfare, the proven technologies of frequency hopping and packet radio will combine to give everyone unlimited and free bandwith. Microsoft, AOL, and all those comfortable with broadcast monopolies are history, regardless of how hard they fight. You can't stop technology. People will use what they know to get what they want.
The point is, there is a reason these ports exist in the first place -- they allow some flexibility and simplify communications. What they're really saying is "We don't like the way the internet is designed. So we're going to break it. Sucks to be you."
There is no reason for a consumer level access user to need to run their own mailserver, and in fact almost none do (on purpose). Of course, many Windows users recently were unwittingly running an SMTP engine in the form of Sobig.(?).
Take your "consumer" outlook and shove it up your ass. Your opinion is based ignorance, perhaps intentional, and a miserly subservience to service levels that have little or no basis in fact. The best solution would be to ban Windoze boxes from the net - they have troubled everyone and no one else should be punished for Microsoft's bad behavior.
The fact is that there are several good mail programs that are secure by default and inform the user of what they are doing. There is no reason everyone should not have Exim on every computer they use. It makes traffic more efficent, enables end to end encryption, and gives users control of their names and accounts. Debian sets things up nicely and anyone can do it. If ISPs could legaly keep their mouths shut and were honest enough to keep client information to themselves, people could have security and anonymity on the net and the net would be a place of free speech like no other. Email over a public network should be regarded as a press, and restrictions of it as violations of the first Amendment to the Constitution.
ISPs supplying service to businesses need to enforce the clauses in most service agreements that require the business to 'not engage in activity that will be detrimental to the network or the Internet as a whole'
Oh, I agree. ISPs can and should enforce clauses that prevent their users from harrasing their neighbors. Spam and push advertising is obnoxious and has no place on the net. Email is a normal and useful service, why should it ever be blocked?
What's that? It should be blocked because Windoze shit is easily broken and periodically floods the net with crap? Hmph!
Users need to be respectful of the fact that they are paying for a consumer level service.
They have to provide a service or someone else will. The boadband monopoly that exists in the US right now is outrageous and it is the only reason ISPs have the nerve to start blocking ports. They have yet to learn not to price themselves higher than the cost of replacing and eliminating them.
If you want business level service, realize this is a higher end cost for the ISP (yes, it is-- more bandwidth, possible peering issues due to ingress vs egress traffic, legal liabilities, etc.)
Once again, fuck you. What the hell is a business packet? In case you have not noticed yet, there is a bandwith glut in the US. Most fibers sit dark and will never be used with dummies like you clamping useless definitions down on my end of the net. Go away, I've already replaced M$ on my end and next I'm going to get around the broadband monopolies. Recently, AOL and other large ISPs leaned on my ISP, Cox, to block port 25 inbound and outbound except throught their SMTP. It's an outrageous DoS attack and I'm going to defeat it.
You'd need the router's password, and to be on the local network, too...
You would have to already own the thing. Why bother when there are so many Windoze boxes behind it you can own so much easier? Security fails at it's weakest link.
And "impossible to remember garbage" is a relative term. While passwords in the format you mention would be confusing to most users, having to type it out every day would likely result in eventual memorization.
You don't memorize characters, you memorize a phrase. Please see, this quick explaination of passphrases. Repetition would indeed help, but you could just as easily use a line from the Matrix you are sure you remember.
Are you sure enough? Assides from simple lines, like "There is no spoon.", I'm not.
You only want to throw the thing out when maintaining it costs more than developing and buying a new one. While it might be hard to modify the concord's swiveling nose this way, it's worth looking into.
The next modification needed is to the law, so that flights that don't make too much noise can fly over the contenetal US. If you can get from New York to California supersonically, people will want to do it and will pay for the above mentioned development and building.
Your quick and easy rules are prey to dictionary attacks. After a password cracker gets passed people and pet names, it's going to go for songs, movies and varients. Granted, you system is just hard enough. Hard enough so that you are more likely to be eaten by a copy of Back Orifice sent to your Outlook. Don't use that garbage for your email? Good, but if your desk is important social engineering atacks come next to determine that, and the dictionary attack begins. No, I don't do this shit, I simply worry about it so I know how to defeat it.
Let's generate you a password right now. Opening a copy of JAVA to page 135, I see many sentances. "There is also a 64-bit double for double precision." Looks promising. From it, we can have:
tiaa64bdfdp
135tiaa64bdfdp
esoa64teren
and other varients, use your imagination, but be consistent.
Highlight the phrase and use the password for a few important but unrelated sites. You should not need many such passwords as most things requiring a password are either inherently insecure anyway or can do you or others no harm if cracked. Things like pop3 and job search sites can and should use throw away passwords like "baddog" like you currently use. Oh yeah, you need even fewer of those because none of them should matter to you anyway.
Passphrases are a good system that for which you only have to remember the system. The length is random. It's not something you will ever write anywhere else. You don't even have to remember the phrase if you can remeber the books you use. Hell, it's easier than 1eet 3pe4k, which also fall to dictionary atacks.
First, admistrators need to follow best practices. MITs Athena system seems to be able to follow users around, and I doubt anyone has a network anymore complicated. I could be wrong because I've only read their stuff online and not much of it. Clueless M$ admins manage to make the task much harder on systems that are far less secure, resulting in nothing but user anoyance. What's the point of a complex sync process when the user's workstation got a keylogger and Back Orifice from a brain dead email client? Clearly, best practices means eliminating the weakest links in the system right down to the desktop.
Users will still be stymied, however, because they need to have accounts from many organizations and don't have good guidance. The linked article only breifly mentioned passphrases and gave no good reasoning for levels of security passwords. Users need to know this stuff too, so that they don't complicate their lives too much.
Understanding levels of security cuts much crap. If it's not secure anyway, don't tax your brain with it. Pop is a good example. It is an unfortunate fact of life that most ISPs do not offer, and sometimes even forbid, secure email transport. For pop and other inherently insecure transport protocals there is no need for many hard to remember passwords, just pick one and use it for all. Fetchmail has all of mine. This also works for all the other services, regardless of how secure, that will do you an no one else any harm if cracked. Silly things like job search sites get one of my dinky passwords and I put it in my html reference page that holds the site address, jobs I've applied to and other notes. Two or three passphrases can work for all the other stuff you use. Just pick a random book off your shelf, highlight and memorize a sentence. If you absolutly must, you can write the sentence down in your wallet, but flipping through a book is more normal than taking your wallet out at work. My most important systems at home get my best and least used passwords, others get less work.
Of course, all is in vain, if you use an insecure operating system or under the thumb of the clueless. Your system going to be cracked and used to harm you and others, as the continuous waves of M$ worms and trojans show. Clueless administrators will give you dozzens of mindless and impossible to remember garbage like "Mkaf5-Ap1" and then suspect thier users when blaster blows them out. You are not such an administrator, are you mraymer?
As long as this is merely an assistant and not the end-all be-all, as long as actual qualified instructors review the essay after this program does, I'm all for it.
If you still need a person to do the work, why bother paying for this dinky software? If you don't trust the program, why would you want it to influence the real grader? Do you really think that Clippy's Big Brother will do a reasonable job? Has it been tested on some of the authors you mention?
Did you even read how the silly thing works? OK, try this from the article:
The testing service recognizes that e-rater could yield a high score on an essay with a well-written but illogical argument. "Right now, e-rater looks at an essay like a bag of words," Dr. Burstein said. "If you use the right words, you could in theory get a good score without the argument necessarily making sense, because it's not at this point tracking a logical line of argumentation."
That's totally worthless. The kinds of "quality" essays where the machine supposedly mimics human graders, must be of exeptionally low value.
These kind of programs have nothing but evil uses. Do you really want everything you ever wrote for school to be digitized and analyzed for word content? It sounds like carnivore all over again. It can't really grade essays, it can only filter words and flag the suspicious ones. The more I think about it, the more I hate it.
If you ever take an educational standards and measurement class, one of the things you'll learn about is the construction and grading of essay questions. This includes writing out objective standards for grading beforehand, possibly even designing a rubric explaining exactly what it takes to earn points.
Show me a program that can write interesting essays and I'll take the grading program seriously.
I hate how some troll always says, " I have no problem [accepting whatever outrage, unjust heahvior, silly restriction or judgment by an ignromaous is offered]." There's always at least one or two highly rated posts who's authors have about as much brains as they do self pride. Go ahead and let Clippy grade your work. He will show up in classrooms and cubiles next year, just as soon as Paladium goes live. You seem to be ready for a very helpful Big Brother.
-to restrict the medium of the net is the beginning of the end of free speech in America and around the world
No, it is the end. You can't partially restrict people's freedom of press. I can either publish what I own how I want or I can't publish it at all. These jackasses might as well say that printing presses are used to distribute porn, that porn is their express purpose, and they must be eliminated.
The US Government found Microsoft to be a predatory monopoly but left them to continue their foul work. The US Government, therefore, has failed to protect it's own citezens and can be thought of as encouraging Microsoft to rape the rest of the world. We should not be surprised when other governments decide to step up to protect their own.
To put things in proper persective, however, consider that the amount of money Japan is throwing at the problem, $1,000,000,000 is about what Microsoft spent mearly promoting XP. This is a tenative first step, but a good one.
I'm looking forward to those three countries breaking Microsoft's lock on hardware makers. That will be a good thing for everyone.
The end of Microsoft will be good for everyone. Companies will have to agree on reasonable and open standards for data exchange and we can begin to undo the damage that M$ has done to hardware. The only reason computer novices think WORD.DOC is a good way to exchange information is because they know of nothing else and think M$ will never die. They learn the format is not even useful for sharing data with themselves as new versions or even changing a printer out screws the whole thing up. The day the last winmodem is made, and video card makers get together again to promote OpenGL as it was supposed to be, will be a wonderful day. Hardware reliablity and exhangeability will improve and people won't have to throw away perfecly suitable equipment because it no longer works with the latest garbage from Redmond. Everything will work beter, last longer and cost less.
Sleep easy. People who are still invested in M$ are like people who have invested in SCO. They are investing in greed and deserve what they get when both of them go tits up.
Propaganda is the idea that saying the word makes it true, that it somehow undoes the corporate culture of law-breaking and dirty tricks. But it only works with the uninformed - people who understand the issues and the history know they're full of shit.
This is very true, believing something does not make it true, ignoring it does not make it go away, and fighting is never futile. If only Cringerly had the guts to fight for his convictions we'd be better off. Cringerly is wrong when he proclaims:
My readers,... are many of them still debating in their minds whether software can even be patented. Whether it can be patented or not, in the U.S., it IS patented, and expecting that some contrary decision will be shortly made and the planets rearranged in space is just folly. This is the difference between cynicism and realism.
How bizzare for Cringerly to understand how M$ works and then recomend resignation. Software is pantented because asswipe companies like M$ made enough people believe that it was good. The only way to reverse this is to continue to understand and tell other why it's bad. How can someone understand that patent and copyright abuse are the means by which inventors are screwed by "innovators" or "sharp business", and not fight such abuse? Propaganda can and is defeated by reality. Understanding that something is wrong and not speaking out or acting is not "realism" or "cynicism" it's cowardice. Shame on you, Mr. Cringerly, for understanding the problem, anouncing it, resigning yourself to suffer and recomending for others to do the same. Knowledge, conviction and an audience have the power to change.
When laws are bad and permit immoral beahvior, people suffer regardless of how happy you tell them they are. Reasonable laws leave people free to act as they will, so long as they don't harm others. Unreasonable laws block the actions of others for the benefit of a few who seek such "protection". Restrictions are something people understand and feel, even when the activity restricted is something they don't ordinarily do.
The gadget concept is interesting but limited and reasonable ISP policy makes it unneeeded. Why bother to carry around a few gigs of data if you could have hundreds of gigs live with a static IP address? The thing you carry around would be useful for accessing that data and perhaps manipulating it when you are surrounded by inferior (Microsoft) software, but my Open Zaurus PDA already does that through ssh and has 802.11b CF available. If my cable provider, Cox, would simply alow "servers" and revert to At Home's far more reasonable static IP system, I'd have all of the benifits of this "revolutionary" new gadget back again.
sig hup Cox; sig hup Microsoft; wake up Intel. Cox and other ISPs need to stand up to Microsoft and media interests or die. Don't give me bull about dynDNS, I want to live upright. I don't need a windoze computer to pop up a silly icon and comprimise all my personal and company data. The good folks at Intel need to realize that people already do this and contribute to projects like Open Zaurus that make it easier, rather than to Microsoft because Microsoft will work to prevent, pervert and control the whole effort. If your data is not on a free platform, someone else owns it.
The computer may be useful for helping people to fill-out/print the ballot, and for rapid counting. But, as has been said a thousand times already, there must be a paper trail.
This is true and the paper trail must be inspected by the voter before it's stored away. If it's not good enough to trust a computer to make electronic records that can't be seen and therfore verified by the voter, it's not good enough to have a printer out of sight either.
Considering that a 2nd phone line costs about $25/month, there's no reason NOT to subscribe. It costs a bit more than half of what dial-up cost me, It's about 25 times as fast, I can buy a $40 router and network it, and it's always on. What's not to love?
Considering that a broken pelvis will put you in the hospital for 6 months and criple your lower extrimities you for life, there's NO reason not to go for a broken neck.
You are comparing one rip off to another, both from the same monopoly provider. Here's what's not to love about either: you have already paid for those lines many times over. The money just fed fat cat executives and stock market scammers.
Star and Open Office both write to Word97/Word2000, and they work just fine for people in the M$ world. So, not only can you read crap from sorry neophytes stuck with M$ crap, you can edit their stuff and give it back to them as well. Generally, this kind of echange goes on by email as attatchments. With a little coaxing, you can get such people to see the light and only send text portions of what you are working on. This is harder to do with people working for big dumb companies or who are otherwise insensitive to bandwith and time constraints.
Right there is where most problems will occur. Also, after reading enough of/., lack of support of VBScript would be another obstacle.
True, I was very upset to see that missing. While Microsoft may break most macros between versions of Word, you can be sure that they still serve as trojan horses, viruses and can wipe your hard drive. Without features such as this, how can Sun and KDE ever hope to compete?
The Star Office equation writer is supposed to rock, much as the one Microsoft bought a few years back. I don't know if it can read M$'s continuing change of binary formats, but Star Office's ability to translate WORD.DOC and M$.XLS junk is very impressive.
Sun simply does not have it together enough to do this right -- they just don't know how to do product development or product management or marketing for applications.
Hmph. Sun has a great reputation and that works wonders. They are in the same league with IBM on that one. Say "Sun" and people think quality and ependability. Say "Microsoft" and people think unethical and poor quality. This is the essence of good marketing. Application sales will come.
They will hate each other, just as soon as this list gets published and they all find their way onto each others lists. Oppps, looks like that just happened. Some community that is.
My impression from this document is that it is an optional feature, only active when the creator of the document specifies who can read it.
You must have missed the part about there being no backward compatibility. The only people who are going to be able to read your shiny new M$ DOC are people with shiny new M$ OS AND a network connection that can see your shiny new M$ $erver. It's going to be harder than ever to share Microsoft crap. Your impression, that you have any choices, is the false one Microsoft would like you to have.
So is your impression about data secruity. This nice little article shows how Microsoft is going to be watching your every keystroke. Witness the "research pane" that pops up next to your documents with relavent stuff. Microsoft is morphing into the biggest spyware application ever. What else would you expect from people who have always considered your desktop their billboard to be bought and sold?
This is hardly new. We use StarOffice 5.2 at work, and it cannot open password-protected documents from Office 95 or 2000. This is amongst the least problems when using that package in a mixed Office-StarOffice environment.
Eliminate the painful end of things and you will have far fewer problems, large and small.
Slashdot Mirror
Sort of. ISPs are being driven to this by larger inept player, such as AOL and M$N who will eventually win if nothing changes. AOL and M$N recently forced my ISP, Cox, to block port 25 except to their own smtp server. The threatened to bounce mail and Cox backed down. Predatory is too nice a word for that threat. Smaller ISPs will die if they reduce their service down to AOL standards.
Change, however, is the only constant. Someone is going to figure a way around the current broadband monopolies. Baring global NBC warfare, the proven technologies of frequency hopping and packet radio will combine to give everyone unlimited and free bandwith. Microsoft, AOL, and all those comfortable with broadcast monopolies are history, regardless of how hard they fight. You can't stop technology. People will use what they know to get what they want.
The point is, there is a reason these ports exist in the first place -- they allow some flexibility and simplify communications. What they're really saying is "We don't like the way the internet is designed. So we're going to break it. Sucks to be you."
Yep, that about sums it up. Fuck them.
Take your "consumer" outlook and shove it up your ass. Your opinion is based ignorance, perhaps intentional, and a miserly subservience to service levels that have little or no basis in fact. The best solution would be to ban Windoze boxes from the net - they have troubled everyone and no one else should be punished for Microsoft's bad behavior.
The fact is that there are several good mail programs that are secure by default and inform the user of what they are doing. There is no reason everyone should not have Exim on every computer they use. It makes traffic more efficent, enables end to end encryption, and gives users control of their names and accounts. Debian sets things up nicely and anyone can do it. If ISPs could legaly keep their mouths shut and were honest enough to keep client information to themselves, people could have security and anonymity on the net and the net would be a place of free speech like no other. Email over a public network should be regarded as a press, and restrictions of it as violations of the first Amendment to the Constitution.
ISPs supplying service to businesses need to enforce the clauses in most service agreements that require the business to 'not engage in activity that will be detrimental to the network or the Internet as a whole'
Oh, I agree. ISPs can and should enforce clauses that prevent their users from harrasing their neighbors. Spam and push advertising is obnoxious and has no place on the net. Email is a normal and useful service, why should it ever be blocked?
What's that? It should be blocked because Windoze shit is easily broken and periodically floods the net with crap? Hmph!
Users need to be respectful of the fact that they are paying for a consumer level service.
They have to provide a service or someone else will. The boadband monopoly that exists in the US right now is outrageous and it is the only reason ISPs have the nerve to start blocking ports. They have yet to learn not to price themselves higher than the cost of replacing and eliminating them.
If you want business level service, realize this is a higher end cost for the ISP (yes, it is-- more bandwidth, possible peering issues due to ingress vs egress traffic, legal liabilities, etc.)
Once again, fuck you. What the hell is a business packet? In case you have not noticed yet, there is a bandwith glut in the US. Most fibers sit dark and will never be used with dummies like you clamping useless definitions down on my end of the net. Go away, I've already replaced M$ on my end and next I'm going to get around the broadband monopolies. Recently, AOL and other large ISPs leaned on my ISP, Cox, to block port 25 inbound and outbound except throught their SMTP. It's an outrageous DoS attack and I'm going to defeat it.
You would have to already own the thing. Why bother when there are so many Windoze boxes behind it you can own so much easier? Security fails at it's weakest link.
You don't memorize characters, you memorize a phrase. Please see, this quick explaination of passphrases. Repetition would indeed help, but you could just as easily use a line from the Matrix you are sure you remember.
Are you sure enough? Assides from simple lines, like "There is no spoon.", I'm not.
You don't need to throw it out, it just needs a nose job. Witness:
Honk, honk!
You only want to throw the thing out when maintaining it costs more than developing and buying a new one. While it might be hard to modify the concord's swiveling nose this way, it's worth looking into.
The next modification needed is to the law, so that flights that don't make too much noise can fly over the contenetal US. If you can get from New York to California supersonically, people will want to do it and will pay for the above mentioned development and building.
Let's generate you a password right now. Opening a copy of JAVA to page 135, I see many sentances. "There is also a 64-bit double for double precision." Looks promising. From it, we can have:
Highlight the phrase and use the password for a few important but unrelated sites. You should not need many such passwords as most things requiring a password are either inherently insecure anyway or can do you or others no harm if cracked. Things like pop3 and job search sites can and should use throw away passwords like "baddog" like you currently use. Oh yeah, you need even fewer of those because none of them should matter to you anyway.
Passphrases are a good system that for which you only have to remember the system. The length is random. It's not something you will ever write anywhere else. You don't even have to remember the phrase if you can remeber the books you use. Hell, it's easier than 1eet 3pe4k, which also fall to dictionary atacks.
These problems are mostly due to cluelessness
Users will still be stymied, however, because they need to have accounts from many organizations and don't have good guidance. The linked article only breifly mentioned passphrases and gave no good reasoning for levels of security passwords. Users need to know this stuff too, so that they don't complicate their lives too much.
Understanding levels of security cuts much crap. If it's not secure anyway, don't tax your brain with it. Pop is a good example. It is an unfortunate fact of life that most ISPs do not offer, and sometimes even forbid, secure email transport. For pop and other inherently insecure transport protocals there is no need for many hard to remember passwords, just pick one and use it for all. Fetchmail has all of mine. This also works for all the other services, regardless of how secure, that will do you an no one else any harm if cracked. Silly things like job search sites get one of my dinky passwords and I put it in my html reference page that holds the site address, jobs I've applied to and other notes. Two or three passphrases can work for all the other stuff you use. Just pick a random book off your shelf, highlight and memorize a sentence. If you absolutly must, you can write the sentence down in your wallet, but flipping through a book is more normal than taking your wallet out at work. My most important systems at home get my best and least used passwords, others get less work.
Of course, all is in vain, if you use an insecure operating system or under the thumb of the clueless. Your system going to be cracked and used to harm you and others, as the continuous waves of M$ worms and trojans show. Clueless administrators will give you dozzens of mindless and impossible to remember garbage like "Mkaf5-Ap1" and then suspect thier users when blaster blows them out. You are not such an administrator, are you mraymer?
If you still need a person to do the work, why bother paying for this dinky software? If you don't trust the program, why would you want it to influence the real grader? Do you really think that Clippy's Big Brother will do a reasonable job? Has it been tested on some of the authors you mention?
Did you even read how the silly thing works? OK, try this from the article:
The testing service recognizes that e-rater could yield a high score on an essay with a well-written but illogical argument. "Right now, e-rater looks at an essay like a bag of words," Dr. Burstein said. "If you use the right words, you could in theory get a good score without the argument necessarily making sense, because it's not at this point tracking a logical line of argumentation."
That's totally worthless. The kinds of "quality" essays where the machine supposedly mimics human graders, must be of exeptionally low value.
These kind of programs have nothing but evil uses. Do you really want everything you ever wrote for school to be digitized and analyzed for word content? It sounds like carnivore all over again. It can't really grade essays, it can only filter words and flag the suspicious ones. The more I think about it, the more I hate it.
Show me a program that can write interesting essays and I'll take the grading program seriously.
I hate how some troll always says, " I have no problem [accepting whatever outrage, unjust heahvior, silly restriction or judgment by an ignromaous is offered]." There's always at least one or two highly rated posts who's authors have about as much brains as they do self pride. Go ahead and let Clippy grade your work. He will show up in classrooms and cubiles next year, just as soon as Paladium goes live. You seem to be ready for a very helpful Big Brother.
"If the case is shit, you must aquit." Dayrl may not go to jail if he manages to get a "jury trial", but Linux and free software are not doomed.
No, it is the end. You can't partially restrict people's freedom of press. I can either publish what I own how I want or I can't publish it at all. These jackasses might as well say that printing presses are used to distribute porn, that porn is their express purpose, and they must be eliminated.
To put things in proper persective, however, consider that the amount of money Japan is throwing at the problem, $1,000,000,000 is about what Microsoft spent mearly promoting XP. This is a tenative first step, but a good one.
I'm looking forward to those three countries breaking Microsoft's lock on hardware makers. That will be a good thing for everyone.
Sleep easy. People who are still invested in M$ are like people who have invested in SCO. They are investing in greed and deserve what they get when both of them go tits up.
This is very true, believing something does not make it true, ignoring it does not make it go away, and fighting is never futile. If only Cringerly had the guts to fight for his convictions we'd be better off. Cringerly is wrong when he proclaims:
My readers, ... are many of them still debating in their minds whether software can even be patented. Whether it can be patented or not, in the U.S., it IS patented, and expecting that some contrary decision will be shortly made and the planets rearranged in space is just folly. This is the difference between cynicism and realism.
How bizzare for Cringerly to understand how M$ works and then recomend resignation. Software is pantented because asswipe companies like M$ made enough people believe that it was good. The only way to reverse this is to continue to understand and tell other why it's bad. How can someone understand that patent and copyright abuse are the means by which inventors are screwed by "innovators" or "sharp business", and not fight such abuse? Propaganda can and is defeated by reality. Understanding that something is wrong and not speaking out or acting is not "realism" or "cynicism" it's cowardice. Shame on you, Mr. Cringerly, for understanding the problem, anouncing it, resigning yourself to suffer and recomending for others to do the same. Knowledge, conviction and an audience have the power to change.
When laws are bad and permit immoral beahvior, people suffer regardless of how happy you tell them they are. Reasonable laws leave people free to act as they will, so long as they don't harm others. Unreasonable laws block the actions of others for the benefit of a few who seek such "protection". Restrictions are something people understand and feel, even when the activity restricted is something they don't ordinarily do.
sig hup Cox; sig hup Microsoft; wake up Intel. Cox and other ISPs need to stand up to Microsoft and media interests or die. Don't give me bull about dynDNS, I want to live upright. I don't need a windoze computer to pop up a silly icon and comprimise all my personal and company data. The good folks at Intel need to realize that people already do this and contribute to projects like Open Zaurus that make it easier, rather than to Microsoft because Microsoft will work to prevent, pervert and control the whole effort. If your data is not on a free platform, someone else owns it.
This is true and the paper trail must be inspected by the voter before it's stored away. If it's not good enough to trust a computer to make electronic records that can't be seen and therfore verified by the voter, it's not good enough to have a printer out of sight either.
Considering that a broken pelvis will put you in the hospital for 6 months and criple your lower extrimities you for life, there's NO reason not to go for a broken neck.
You are comparing one rip off to another, both from the same monopoly provider. Here's what's not to love about either: you have already paid for those lines many times over. The money just fed fat cat executives and stock market scammers.
Star and Open Office both write to Word97/Word2000, and they work just fine for people in the M$ world. So, not only can you read crap from sorry neophytes stuck with M$ crap, you can edit their stuff and give it back to them as well. Generally, this kind of echange goes on by email as attatchments. With a little coaxing, you can get such people to see the light and only send text portions of what you are working on. This is harder to do with people working for big dumb companies or who are otherwise insensitive to bandwith and time constraints.
see ghostscript and ps2pdf source to learn about Post Script and Portable Document Format.
True, I was very upset to see that missing. While Microsoft may break most macros between versions of Word, you can be sure that they still serve as trojan horses, viruses and can wipe your hard drive. Without features such as this, how can Sun and KDE ever hope to compete?
The Star Office equation writer is supposed to rock, much as the one Microsoft bought a few years back. I don't know if it can read M$'s continuing change of binary formats, but Star Office's ability to translate WORD.DOC and M$.XLS junk is very impressive.
Hmph. Sun has a great reputation and that works wonders. They are in the same league with IBM on that one. Say "Sun" and people think quality and ependability. Say "Microsoft" and people think unethical and poor quality. This is the essence of good marketing. Application sales will come.
They will hate each other, just as soon as this list gets published and they all find their way onto each others lists. Oppps, looks like that just happened. Some community that is.
You must have missed the part about there being no backward compatibility. The only people who are going to be able to read your shiny new M$ DOC are people with shiny new M$ OS AND a network connection that can see your shiny new M$ $erver. It's going to be harder than ever to share Microsoft crap. Your impression, that you have any choices, is the false one Microsoft would like you to have.
So is your impression about data secruity. This nice little article shows how Microsoft is going to be watching your every keystroke. Witness the "research pane" that pops up next to your documents with relavent stuff. Microsoft is morphing into the biggest spyware application ever. What else would you expect from people who have always considered your desktop their billboard to be bought and sold?
This is hardly new. We use StarOffice 5.2 at work, and it cannot open password-protected documents from Office 95 or 2000. This is amongst the least problems when using that package in a mixed Office-StarOffice environment.
Eliminate the painful end of things and you will have far fewer problems, large and small.
time for a better job!